open source marketer and community manager

Month: November 2013

Email is still one of the best mechanism to get push notifications, so getting automatic nudges via email from Ask OpenStack is useful. I took some time to document how to get an email message every time a new question is asked on Ask OpenStack.

The core of the configuration is available on the personal profile page. In my case the URL is https://ask.openstack.org/en/users/9/smaffulli/?sort=email_subscriptions: hit your username in the top navigation bar and then pick ‘subscriptions‘. The page will look like the screenshot below.

Askbot email settings

As of today Ask OpenStack gets around 10 new questions per day and the rate is increasing steadily. I highlighted the configuration that can help you prevent getting too many emails: select the frequency of the notifications want to get notifications first in the line “Entire forum (tag filtered)”. Then set the tag filter: I picked “only subscribed tags”. You can modify the tags you want to receive notifications from the form at the bottom of the page:

Add tags you’re interested in to this form

Tags are added by the person asking the question and can be edited by anybody with karma higher than 100. On the same subscriptions page there is also a setting to receive notifications for questions asked in Chinese languages.

On Ask OpenStack home page there are also ways to customize the site further, hiding questions carrying ignored tags from the view or highlighting interesting ones

Back from busy days in one of the most exciting cities I’ve ever visited, I needed some time to put thougths back in order, recover from jet lag and deal with my irremediably broken WordPress installation (will probably blog about this later, too). Hong Kong was a blast in many aspects. The Summit itself started with lions dancing at the sound of drums in front of over 3,000 people:

There has been an incredible growth inside and around OpenStack, the project is growing fast. Growth is good, it’s what we wanted so we have plenty of reasons to celebrate. The second edition of the User Survey brought us more insights about usage of OpenStack around the world. We announced our first OpenStack Ambassadors, people who will help the OpenStack Community team get closer to many communities around the world. It was great to meet personally more women from the Outreach Program for Women of OpenStack. we’ve been doing this for over a year now, it’s a thing.

Growth also brings challenges and some of them were evident in some of the conversations had at the Summit, around it and after. A few signals I caught during and around the Design Summit sessions highlighted that we may need to start taking new steps to reinforce the culture of collaboration inside the project. The challenges highlighted go from lack of reviewers (not core reviewers, just developers who pay attention and help others), PTLs getting overloaded, the high traffic on the Development mailing list (which leads to loss of information), the increasing number of questions on Ask OpenStack with no interactions (no up/down votes, comments, etc) and little engagement in its Chinese version, the challenges inside the Internationalization Team with processes and tools. We’ve also heard of a very few Design sessions where it was too hard to have a productive discussion because of one or two uncollaborative people.

Since we’re getting so many new developers in the project we’re probably getting to the point where we can’t assume they are accustomed to contributing upstream first. The founders and first members of OpenStack all had a brilliant pedigree of open source contributions and collaboration. New members of the OpenStack Foundation may need some help to succeed. I enjoyed the session Getting Your Blueprint Accepted Quicker: the VPNaaS Use Case so much that I’m proposing the Upstream University training as an official program at the OpenStack Foundation to help new members. I’ll write more about this in the future.

The next six months will continue to be super exciting and full of things to do. If you have missed Hong Kong go watch the recordings of the sessions keep watching this space for more news.